We love food. We love eating it, cooking with it, growing it, playing with it and talking about it… It’s our fuel where would we be without our faithful bowl of porridge in the morning or handy pasta pesto dish?

Yet, according to Transition Edinburgh University’s rather fantastic ‘Footprints & Handprints’ report the food we consume here at the university makes up around 15% of our community carbon footprint today. In fact, we’ve found the more you delve, the more hair-raising stats you come across when it comes to food – be they about our health, our farmers, our soil or diets…

’1 in 3 meals eaten in Britain is a ready meal’

’1/3rd of the world’s crop feed animals not people’

‘We throw away 1/3rd of all food we buy’

‘The average age of a British farmer today is 59’

All pretty scary in different ways… but considering we live here in Edinburgh surrounded by great farmers, farmland, community allotments and have access to good quality food, we reckon we can do some simple things to address these trends here in our local community.

We believe that the fair and sustainable sourcing and distribution of our food is the most important consideration when looking towards the future, both within and beyond the University.